1. Field of the Invention
Methods and apparatuses consistent with the present invention relate to image encoding and decoding and more particularly, to an image encoding apparatus and method and an image decoding apparatus and method for reducing the occupancy rate of bandwidth of a data bus during an image encoding/decoding process.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an image encoding/decoding system, as the size of an image increases, more frames are required to be processed per second, and bandwidth shortage and real-time processing issues become more serious. In particular, in image encoding/decoding systems, much of the available bandwidth is used to perform motion estimation, motion compensation and deblocking filtering and thus various attempts have been made to reduce the size of data therefor.
In image encoding/decoding systems, residual information is generated from a comparison of a current frame with a reference frame. Thus the reference frame and the residual information between the current frame and the reference frame are needed to reconstruct the current frame. Reference data is transmitted from an external memory via a data bus.